Name	Ellen McLain
Background	solo_singer
Origin	Nashville, Tennessee
Instrument	Voice
Occupation	Soprano/Voice Actor

Ellen McLain is an opera singer and voice actress from Nashville, Tennessee, USA. McLain provides voices for many characters in several video games from Valve. Among them are GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence antagonist in Portal (for which she won an AIAS Interactive Achievement Award for Outstanding Achievement in Character Performance) and Portal 2, the announcer in Team Fortress 2, and the voice of the Combine overwatch for the Half-Life 2 series.

She was educated at The North Carolina School of the Arts and The New England Conservatory in Boston where she received her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees with Honors in Music. She is an award winner from the National Institute for Music Theater in Washington, D.C. and she has also had the honor of performing at The White House.

McLain is the only person to have her voice in all the games in the Orange Box.

McLain also sang the ending credits song to Portal, "Still Alive", written by Jonathan Coulton.

McLain is married to John Patrick Lowrie, a fellow voice actor, who also worked on the video games Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. In Half-Life 2, McLain voiced the antagonistic Overwatch voice, while her husband voiced a citizen who assists the protagonist. In Team Fortress 2, McLain voices the announcer and Lowrie plays the Sniper.

McLain is scheduled to reprise the role of GLaDOS in Portal 2.

References

External links

Category:American voice actors Category:American singers Category:American video game actors Category:Interactive Achievement Award winners Category:People from Nashville, Tennessee Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people

Name	Jonathan Coulton
Background	solo_singer
Born	December 01, 1970
Origin	Brooklyn, New York City
Instrument	Guitar, banjo, ukulele, zendrum, tenori-on
Genre	Folk rock, powerpop
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Years active	2003–present
Associated acts	Paul and StormKristen ShirtsJohn HodgmanMolly LewisEllen McLainZe FrankRiffTraxThey Might Be Giants
Url	http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

Jonathan Coulton (born December 1, 1970) is an American singer-songwriter, famous for his songs containing themes of geek culture as well as his rise to popularity through the use of the Internet. Among his most popular songs are "Re: Your Brains" and "Still Alive", the latter of which played over the end credits of the video game Portal (though he did not sing it).

A former computer programmer and self-described geek, Coulton tends to write quirky, witty lyrics about a variety of topics such as science fiction and technology: a man who thinks in simian terms, a mad scientist who falls in love with one of his captives, and the dangers of bacteria. He does not often write topical songs, but he did release a song titled "W's Duty", which sampled President George W. Bush, in 2005 and another called "Tom Cruise Crazy" in 2006. Most of Coulton's songs feature Coulton's vocals accompanied by guitar, bass, and drums, though they often feature the various other instruments Coulton plays, including accordion, harmonica, mandolin, banjo, ukulele, or glockenspiel.

Coulton graduated from Yale in 1993 and is a former member of the Yale Whiffenpoofs and the Yale Spizzwinks(?). He is now the Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science magazine, whose September 2005 issue was accompanied by a five-song set by him called Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms. He is also the Musical Director for The Little Gray Book Lectures.

Career

Coulton's best known works include his light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song "Baby Got Back" and original pieces such as "Still Alive", the theme song for the video game Portal, and "Code Monkey", which has been featured on Slashdot on April 23, 2006 as well as linked from the webcomic Penny Arcade. It was the theme song for an animated show on G4 called Code Monkeys. A video set to his song "Re: Your Brains" was a featured link on Good Morning Silicon Valley, and his work has also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered.

Coulton accompanied John Hodgman on his list of "700 Hobo Names" promotional track for Hodgman's book The Areas of My Expertise as the guitarist (he was referenced as "Jonathan William Coulton, the Colchester Kid" in said work). Coulton also can be heard throughout the audiobook version of the same book, playing the theme song to the book, playing incidental music, and at times engaging in witty banter with Hodgman, who reads the audio version of his work. Coulton has also been referenced in Hodgman's work with The Daily Show; a Jonathan Coulton of Colchester, Connecticut is Hodgman's pick to win an essay contest on overpowering Iraqi resistance to American invasion. The winning entry, as set to music, was then played on the program; this song, about dropping snakes from airplanes, was written and performed by Coulton. He also appeared on the tour for Hodgman's newest book, More Information Than You Require.

Coulton is credited as the composer of the title music for the show Mystery Diagnosis.

Coulton also has released other songs under "The Little Gray Book Lectures". In 2006, Coulton began touring with and co-wrote a song with comedy-duo Paul and Storm entitled "Your Love Is", which appeared on their album News to Us. They have since toured together almost exclusively, rarely appearing with any other artists.

Coulton wrote and performed a song titled "Still Alive" for the ending credits of Valve's 2007 video game Portal, with vocals by Ellen McLain. On April 1, 2008, Harmonix made this track available as free downloadable content for the game Rock Band. A version with Coulton's vocals was also included on the Orange Box Original Soundtrack, in addition to the one heard at the end of the game.

A DVD & CD of a concert performed February 22, 2008 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, entitled "Best. Concert. Ever." was released in 2009. At the concert, Coulton played the aforementioned song "Still Alive" on its Rock Band version, along with guest "musicians" and geek/celebrities Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann and Veronica Belmont.

Coulton also opened for They Might Be Giants for a few shows of their March 2010 tour.

Coulton had previously been working on his follow-up to the Thing a Week albums, tentatively titled 'The Aftermath.' It has since been stated that the title is merely an umbrella term to classify non-album tracks released after Thing a Week. On May 25, 2010 Coulton announced on his official site that he would indeed be working on a new album, to be produced by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, and for the first time ever with a full band, including Marty Beller of They Might Be Giants, in a professional recording studio. They're scheduled to perform as a full band for a few shows before returning to New York to start recording the new album, for which a few new songs have already been written.

Licensing

As an Internet-based performing artist, Coulton has attracted a group of fans who promote him. Since Coulton uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, others are free to use his songs in their own noncommercial works. As a result, a number of music videos have been created using his songs, including such machinima as the ILL Clan's video for "Code Monkey".

Thing a Week

"Thing a Week" is the name that Coulton gave to a creative experiment which ran from September 16, 2005 to September 30, 2006. In this project, Coulton undertook to record 52 musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. This target was achieved. The objectives were: (a) to push the artist's creative envelope by adopting what Coulton describes as a "forced-march approach to writing and recording"; (b) to prove to himself that he was capable of producing creative output to a deadline; and (c) to test the viability of the Internet and Creative Commons as a platform capable of supporting a professional artist financially. Early indications are that the experiment succeeded in generating a large number of high quality songs, boosting sales of music downloads, expanding Coulton's public presence and enlarging his fan base. The success of the financial objective is more difficult to judge, but Coulton was quoted in a September 2006 interview as stating that "in some parts of the country, I’d be making a decent living". In a February 25, 2008, interview with This Week in Tech, he stated that he made more money in 2007 than he did in his last year of working as a programmer, 40% of it from digital downloads and 40% from merchandise and performances.

Discography

Studio albums

Smoking Monkey (2003)

Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (2004)

Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms (2005)

Thing a Week One (2006)

Thing a Week Two (2006)

Thing a Week Three (2006)

Thing a Week Four (2006)

Compilations

JoCo Looks Back (2008)

Best. Concert. Ever. (Live album - 2009)

Other releases

Other Experiments (Rarities Collection) (2005)

Unplugged (Live on Second Life) (2006)

The Orange Box Original Soundtrack (2007)

* 1. Still Alive (Sung by Ellen McLain)

* 19. Still Alive (Sung by Jonathan Coulton)

The Aftermath (2009)

Most of Coulton's songs are published on his website as MP3 and FLAC downloads. Many of them are free, and none of them are subject to digital rights management. All of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 License. "Still Alive" is the only exception to this, as Coulton assigned all rights for the song to Valve. Along with "Still Alive", Coulton's song "Re: Your Brains" appears in jukeboxes in Left 4 Dead 2, another game designed by Valve.

References

External links

Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog, a profile of Jonathan Coulton in the New York Times Magazine dated May 13, 2007.

Category:1970 births Category:Living people Category:American comedy musicians Category:American singer-songwriters Category:American bloggers Category:Yale University alumni Category:People from Brooklyn

Name	W. T. Tutte
Birth date	May 14, 1917
Birth place	Newmarket, Suffolk, England
Death date	May 02, 2002
Death place	Kitchener, Ontario
Fields	Mathematics
Workplaces	University of TorontoUniversity of Waterloo
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Shaun Wylie
Awards	Order of CanadaIsaak-Walton-Killam AwardHenry Marshall Tory MedalCRM-Fields-PIMS prize
Signature

William Thomas Tutte, OC, FRS, (May 14, 1917 – May 2, 2002) was a British, later Canadian, codebreaker and mathematician. During World War II he broke a major German code system, which had a significant impact on the Allied invasion of Europe. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of combinatorics and graph theory.

Early life and education

Tutte was born in Newmarket in Suffolk, the son of a gardener. At age 18 he studied chemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge University. As a student he (along with three of his friends) became the first to solve the problem of squaring the square. Together the four created the pseudonym Blanche Descartes, under which Tutte published occasionally for years.

World War II

On the outbreak of World War II, his tutor suggested he join the Government Code and Cypher School, which he did in May 1941. Tutte worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker, and deduced the structure of the German Lorenz SZ 40/42 encryption machine (codenamed Tunny), intended for high-level German Army communications, using only a number of intercepted encrypted messages, an achievement described as "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II" . Using his breakthrough, the British constructed an entire organization (including the famed Colossus computer) to read the messages sent in this system.

Doctorate and career

Tutte completed a doctorate in mathematics from Cambridge in 1948 under the supervision of Shaun Wylie, who had also worked at Bletchley Park on Tunny. The same year, invited by Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, he accepted a position at the University of Toronto. In 1962, he moved to the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario where he stayed for the rest of his academic career. He officially retired in 1985 but remained active as an emeritus professor. Tutte was instrumental in helping to found the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.

His mathematical career concentrated on combinatorics, especially graph theory, which he is credited as having helped create in its modern form, and matroid theory, to which he made profound contributions; one colleague described him as "the leading mathematician in combinatorics for three decades". He was editor in chief of The Journal of Combinatorial Theory when it was started, and served on the editorial boards of several other mathematical research journals.

His work in graph theory includes the structure of cycle and cut spaces, size of maximum matchings and existence of k-factors in graphs, and Hamiltonian and non-Hamiltonian graphs. He disproved Tait's conjecture using the construction known as Tutte's fragment. The eventual proof of the four color theorem made use of his earlier work. The graph polynomial he called the "dichromate" has become famous and influential under the name Tutte polynomial and serves as the prototype of combinatorial invariants that are universal for all invariants that satisfy a specified reduction law.

In matroid theory he discovered the highly sophisticated homotopy theorem as well as founding the studies of chain groups and regular matroids, about which he proved deep results.

Positions and award

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2001 he was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and won the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize.

See also

BEST theorem

Tutte matrix

Tutte theorem

Tutte-Berge formula

Tutte graph, Tutte–Coxeter graph and Tutte 12-cage.

Systolic geometry

References

Brooks, R. L.; Smith, C. A. B.; Stone, A. H.; and Tutte, W. T. "The Dissection of Rectangles into Squares." Duke Math. J. 7, 312-340, 1940

External links

Professor William T. Tutte

William Tutte, 84, Mathematician and Code-breaker, Dies - Obituary from The New York Times

William Tutte: Unsung mathematical mastermind - Obituary from The Guardian

CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize - 2001 - William T. Tutte

Tutte's paper on the Fish cipher

Tutte's disproof of Tait's conjecture

Category:1917 births Category:2002 deaths Category:People from Newmarket, Suffolk Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:Graph theorists Category:People associated with Bletchley Park Category:Canadian mathematicians Category:British mathematicians Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:Officers of the Order of Canada Category:British expatriate academics in Canada Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Combinatorists Category:University of Toronto faculty Category:University of Waterloo faculty

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (, English see fn.), baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of Mozart's death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

Biography

Family and early years

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart at 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg, capital of the sovereign Archbishopric of Salzburg, in what is now Austria but, at the time, was part of the Bavarian Circle in the Holy Roman Empire. His only sibling to survive past birth was Maria Anna (1751–1829), called "Nannerl". Wolfgang was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert's Cathedral. The baptismal record gives his name in Latinized form as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He generally called himself "Wolfgang Amadè Mozart" as an adult, but there were many variants.

His father Leopold (1719–1787) was from Augsburg. He was deputy Kapellmeister to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, a minor composer, and an experienced teacher. In the year of Mozart's birth, his father published a violin textbook, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, which achieved success.

; painted in 1763 on commission from Leopold]]When Nannerl was seven, she began keyboard lessons with her father; and her three-year-old brother would look on, evidently fascinated. Years later, after his death, she reminisced:

He often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was always striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good. [...] In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier. [...] He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time. [...] At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.

These early pieces, K. 1–5, were recorded in the Nannerl Notenbuch.

Biographer Maynard Solomon notes that, while Leopold was a devoted teacher to his children, there is evidence that Wolfgang was keen to make progress beyond what he was being taught. His first ink-spattered composition and his precocious efforts with the violin were on his own initiative and came as a great surprise to Leopold. Leopold eventually gave up composing when his son's outstanding musical talents became evident. He was Wolfgang's only teacher in his earliest years and taught his children languages and academic subjects as well as music.]]

1762–1773: Years of travel

During Mozart's youth, his family made several European journeys in which he and Nannerl performed as child prodigies. These began with an exhibition, in 1762, at the court of the Prince-elector Maximilian III of Bavaria in Munich, and at the Imperial Court in Vienna and Prague. A long concert tour spanning three and a half years followed, taking the family to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zurich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. During this trip, Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other composers. A particularly important influence was Johann Christian Bach, whom Mozart visited in London in 1764 and 1765. The family again went to Vienna in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768.

These trips were often arduous. Travel conditions were primitive; the family had to wait for invitations and reimbursement from the nobility. They endured long, near-fatal illnesses far from home: first Leopold (London, summer 1764) then both children (The Hague, autumn 1765).

After one year in Salzburg, father and son set off for Italy, leaving Wolfgang's mother and his sister at home. This travel lasted from December 1769 to March 1771. As with earlier journeys, Leopold wanted to display his son's abilities as a performer and a rapidly maturing composer. Wolfgang met G. B. Martini, in Bologna, and was accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica. In Rome, he heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel. He wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors—thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican.

In Milan, Mozart wrote the opera Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), which was performed with success. This led to further opera commissions. He returned with his father later twice to Milan (August–December 1771; October 1772 – March 1773) for the composition and premieres of Ascanio in Alba (1771) and Lucio Silla (1772). Leopold hoped these visits would result in a professional appointment for his son in Italy, but these hopes were never fulfilled.

Toward the end of the final Italian journey, Mozart wrote the first of his works to be still widely performed today, the solo cantata Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165.

1773–1777: The Salzburg court

After finally returning with his father from Italy on 13 March 1773, Mozart was employed as a court musician by the ruler of Salzburg, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. The composer had a great number of friends and admirers in Salzburg and had the opportunity to work in many genres, composing symphonies, sonatas, string quartets, serenades, and a few minor operas. Several of these early works are still performed today. Between April and December 1775, Mozart developed an enthusiasm for violin concertos, producing a series of five (the only ones he ever wrote), which steadily increased in their musical sophistication. The last three—K. 216, K. 218, K. 219—are now staples of the repertoire. In 1776 he turned his efforts to piano concertos, culminating in the E-flat concerto K. 271 of early 1777, considered by critics to be a breakthrough work.

Despite these artistic successes, Mozart grew increasingly discontent with Salzburg and redoubled his efforts to find a position elsewhere. One reason was his low salary, 150 florins a year; Mozart also longed to compose operas, and Salzburg provided only rare occasions for these. The situation worsened in 1775 when the court theater was closed, especially since the other theater in Salzburg was largely reserved for visiting troupes.

Two long expeditions in search of work (both Leopold and Wolfgang were looking) interrupted this long Salzburg stay: they visited Vienna, from 14 July to 26 September 1773, and Munich, from 6 December 1774 to March 1775. Neither visit was successful, though the Munich journey resulted in a popular success with the premiere of Mozart's opera La finta giardiniera.

1777–1778: The Paris journey

In August 1777, Mozart resigned his Salzburg position and, on 23 September, ventured out once more in search of employment, with visits to Augsburg, Mannheim, Paris, and Munich. Since Archbishop Colloredo would not give Leopold leave to travel, Mozart's mother Anna Maria accompanied him.

Mozart became acquainted with members of the famous orchestra in Mannheim, the best in Europe at the time. He also fell in love with Aloysia Weber, one of four daughters in a musical family. There were prospects of employment in Mannheim, but they came to nothing, and Mozart left for Paris on 14 March 1778 to continue his search. One of his letters from Paris hints at a possible post as an organist at Versailles, but Mozart was not interested in such an appointment. He fell into debt and took to pawning valuables. The nadir of the visit occurred when Mozart's mother took ill and died on 3 July 1778. There had been delays in calling a doctor—probably, according to Halliwell, because of a lack of funds.

While Wolfgang was in Paris, Leopold was pursuing opportunities for him back in Salzburg, and, with the support of local nobility, secured him a post as court organist and concertmaster. The yearly salary was 450 florins, but Wolfgang was reluctant to accept. After leaving Paris on 26 September 1778, he tarried in Mannheim and Munich, still hoping to obtain an appointment outside Salzburg. In Munich, he again encountered Aloysia, now a very successful singer, but she made it plain that she was no longer interested in him. Mozart finally reached home on 15 January 1779 and took up the new position, but his discontent with Salzburg was undiminished.

Among the better known works that Mozart wrote on the Paris journey are the A minor piano sonata K. 310/300d and the "Paris" Symphony (no. 31); these were performed in Paris on 12 June and 18 June 1778. for his gallery; Mozart with the Order of the Golden Spur which he received in 1770 as a 14-year old from Pope Clement XIV in Rome.]]

1781: Departure to Vienna

In January 1781, Mozart's opera Idomeneo premiered with "considerable success" in Munich. The following March the composer was summoned to Vienna, where his employer, Archbishop Colloredo, was attending the celebrations for the accession of Joseph II to the Austrian throne. Mozart, fresh from the adulation he had earned in Munich, was offended when Colloredo treated him as a mere servant and particularly when the archbishop forbade him to perform before the Emperor at Countess Thun's for a fee equal to half of his yearly Salzburg salary. The resulting quarrel came to a head in May: Mozart attempted to resign and was refused. The following month, permission was granted but in a grossly insulting way: the composer was dismissed literally "with a kick in the ass", administered by the archbishop's steward, Count Arco. Mozart decided to settle in Vienna as a freelance performer and composer.

Early Vienna years

Mozart's new career in Vienna began well. He performed often as a pianist, notably in a competition before the Emperor with Muzio Clementi on 24 December 1781, and he soon "had established himself as the finest keyboard player in Vienna". Aloysia, who had earlier rejected Mozart's suit, was now married to the actor Joseph Lange, and Mozart's interest shifted to the third daughter, Constanze. The courtship did not go entirely smoothly; surviving correspondence indicates that Mozart and Constanze briefly broke up in April 1782. Mozart also faced a very difficult task in getting his father's permission for the marriage. The couple were finally married on 4 August 1782, in St. Stephen's Cathedral, the day before Leopold's consent arrived in the mail.

In 1783, Wolfgang and Constanze visited his family in Salzburg. Leopold and Nannerl were, at best, only polite to Constanze, but the visit prompted the composition of one of Mozart's great liturgical pieces, the Mass in C minor. Though not completed, it was premiered in Salzburg, with Constanze singing a solo part.

Mozart met Joseph Haydn in Vienna, and the two composers became friends (see Haydn and Mozart). When Haydn visited Vienna, they sometimes played together in an impromptu string quartet. Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn (K. 387, K. 421, K. 428, K. 458, K. 464, and K. 465) date from the period 1782 to 1785, and are judged to be a response to Haydn's Opus 33 set from 1781. Haydn in 1785 told the visiting Leopold: "I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition."

From 1782 to 1785 Mozart mounted concerts with himself as soloist, presenting three or four new piano concertos in each season. Since space in the theaters was scarce, he booked unconventional venues: a large room in the Trattnerhof (an apartment building), and the ballroom of the Mehlgrube (a restaurant). The concerts were very popular, and the concertos he premiered at them are still firm fixtures in the repertoire. Solomon writes that during this period Mozart created "a harmonious connection between an eager composer-performer and a delighted audience, which was given the opportunity of witnessing the transformation and perfection of a major musical genre". Mozart also bought a fine fortepiano from Anton Walter for about 900 florins, and a billiard table for about 300. and kept servants. Saving was therefore impossible, and the short period of financial success did nothing to soften the hardship the Mozarts were later to experience.

On 14 December 1784, Mozart became a Freemason, admitted to the lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit ("Beneficence"). Freemasonry played an important role in the remainder of Mozart's life: he attended meetings, a number of his friends were Masons, and on various occasions he composed Masonic music. (See Mozart and Freemasonry.)

1786–1787: Return to opera

Despite the great success of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart did little operatic writing for the next four years, producing only two unfinished works and the one-act Der Schauspieldirektor. He focused instead on his career as a piano soloist and writer of concertos. However, around the end of 1785, Mozart moved away from keyboard writing and began his famous operatic collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. 1786 saw the successful premiere of The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna. Its reception in Prague later in the year was even warmer, and this led to a second collaboration with Da Ponte: the opera Don Giovanni, which premiered in October 1787 to acclaim in Prague, and also met with success in Vienna in 1788. The two are among Mozart's most important works and are mainstays of the operatic repertoire today, though at their premieres their musical complexity caused difficulty for both listeners and performers. These developments were not witnessed by the composer's father, as Leopold had died on 28 May 1787.

In December 1787 Mozart finally obtained a steady post under aristocratic patronage. Emperor Joseph II appointed him as his "chamber composer", a post that had fallen vacant the previous month on the death of Gluck. It was a part-time appointment, paying just 800 florins per year, and only required Mozart to compose dances for the annual balls in the Redoutensaal. However, even this modest income became important to Mozart when hard times arrived. Court records show that Joseph's aim was to keep the esteemed composer from leaving Vienna in pursuit of better prospects.

In 1787 the young Ludwig van Beethoven spent several weeks in Vienna, hoping to study with Mozart. No reliable records survive to indicate whether the two composers ever met. (See Mozart and Beethoven.)

1788–1790

, made by Dora Stock during Mozart's visit to Dresden, April 1789]] Toward the end of the decade, Mozart's circumstances worsened. Around 1786 he had ceased to appear frequently in public concerts, and his income shrank. This was a difficult time for musicians in Vienna because Austria was at war, and both the general level of prosperity and the ability of the aristocracy to support music had declined.

By mid-1788, Mozart and his family had moved from central Vienna to the suburb of Alsergrund. Mozart began to borrow money, most often from his friend and fellow Mason Michael Puchberg; "a pitiful sequence of letters pleading for loans" survives. Maynard Solomon and others have suggested that Mozart was suffering from depression, and it seems that his output slowed. Major works of the period include the last three symphonies (Nos. 39, 40, and 41, all from 1788), and the last of the three Da Ponte operas, Così fan tutte, premiered in 1790.

Around this time Mozart made long journeys hoping to improve his fortunes: to Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin in the spring of 1789 (see Mozart's Berlin journey), and to Frankfurt, Mannheim, and other German cities in 1790. The trips produced only isolated success and did not relieve the family's financial distress.

1791

Mozart's last year was, until his final illness struck, a time of great productivity—and by some accounts a time of personal recovery. He composed a great deal, including some of his most admired works: the opera The Magic Flute, the final piano concerto (K. 595 in B-flat), the Clarinet Concerto K. 622, the last in his great series of string quintets (K. 614 in E-flat), the motet Ave verum corpus K. 618, and the unfinished Requiem K. 626.

Mozart's financial situation, a source of extreme anxiety in 1790, finally began to improve. Although the evidence is inconclusive, it appears that wealthy patrons in Hungary and Amsterdam pledged annuities to Mozart in return for the occasional composition. He probably also benefited from the sale of dance music written in his role as Imperial chamber composer. and the Little Masonic Cantata K. 623, premiered on 15 November 1791.

Final illness and death

in 1819]] Mozart fell ill while in Prague for the premiere on 6 September of his opera La clemenza di Tito, written in 1791 on commission for the Emperor's coronation festivities. He was able to continue his professional functions for some time, and conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute on 30 September. The illness intensified on 20 November, at which point Mozart became bedridden, suffering from swelling, pain, and vomiting.

Mozart was nursed in his final illness by Constanze and her youngest sister Sophie, and attended by the family doctor, Thomas Franz Closset. It is clear that he was mentally occupied with the task of finishing his Requiem. However, the evidence that he actually dictated passages to his student Süssmayr is very slim.

Mozart died at 1 a.m. on 5 December 1791 at the age of 35. The New Grove gives a matter-of-fact description of his funeral:

The cause of Mozart's death cannot be known with certainty. The official record has it as "hitziges Frieselfieber" ("severe miliary fever", referring to a rash that looks like millet seeds), a description that does not suffice to identify the cause as it would be diagnosed in modern medicine. Researchers have posited at least 118 causes of death, including trichinosis, influenza, mercury poisoning, and a rare kidney ailment. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Mozart died of acute rheumatic fever.

Mozart's sparse funeral did not reflect his standing with the public as a composer: memorial services and concerts in Vienna and Prague were well attended. Indeed, in the period immediately after his death, Mozart's reputation rose substantially: Solomon describes an "unprecedented wave of enthusiasm" for his work; biographies were written (first by Schlichtegroll, Niemetschek, and Nissen; see Biographies of Mozart); and publishers vied to produce complete editions of his works.

Mozart usually worked long and hard, finishing compositions at a tremendous pace as deadlines approached. He often made sketches and drafts; unlike Beethoven's these are mostly not preserved, as Constanze sought to destroy them after his death. (See: Mozart's compositional method.) He was raised a Roman Catholic and remained a member of the Church throughout his life. (See Mozart and Roman Catholicism.)

Mozart lived at the center of the Viennese musical world, and knew a great number and variety of people: fellow musicians, theatrical performers, fellow Salzburgers, and aristocrats, including some acquaintance with the Emperor Joseph II. Solomon considers his three closest friends to have been Gottfried von Jacquin, Count August Hatzfeld, and Sigmund Barisani; others included his older colleague Joseph Haydn, singers Franz Xaver Gerl and Benedikt Schack, and the horn player Joseph Leutgeb. Leutgeb and Mozart carried on a curious kind of friendly mockery, often with Leutgeb as the butt of Mozart's practical jokes.

He enjoyed billiards and dancing (see Mozart and dance), and kept pets: a canary, a starling, a dog, and also a horse for recreational riding. He had a fondness for scatological humor, which is preserved in his surviving letters, notably those written to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart around 1777–1778, but also in his correspondence with his sister and parents. Mozart even wrote scatological music, a series of canons that he sang with his friends. See: Mozart and scatology.

Works, musical style, and innovations

Style

" (K. 626) in Mozart's own handwriting. It is located at the Mozarthaus in Vienna.]] Mozart's music, like Haydn's, stands as an archetype of the Classical style. At the time he began composing, European music was dominated by the style galant, a reaction against the highly evolved intricacy of the Baroque. Progressively, and in large part at the hands of Mozart himself, the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque emerged once more, moderated and disciplined by new forms, and adapted to a new aesthetic and social milieu. Mozart was a versatile composer, and wrote in every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata. These forms were not new, but Mozart advanced their technical sophistication and emotional reach. He almost single-handedly developed and popularized the Classical piano concerto. He wrote a great deal of religious music, including large-scale masses, but also dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment.

The central traits of the Classical style are all present in Mozart's music. Clarity, balance, and transparency are the hallmarks of his work, but simplistic notions of its delicacy mask the exceptional power of his finest masterpieces, such as the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550, and the opera Don Giovanni. Charles Rosen makes the point forcefully:

It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the center of Mozart's work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence. In a paradoxical way, Schumann's superficial characterization of the G minor Symphony can help us to see Mozart's daemon more steadily. In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous.

Especially during his last decade, Mozart exploited chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time, with remarkable assurance and to great artistic effect.

Mozart always had a gift for absorbing and adapting valuable features of others' music. His travels helped in the forging of a unique compositional language. In London as a child, he met J.C. Bach and heard his music. In Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna he met with other compositional influences, as well as the avant-garde capabilities of the Mannheim orchestra. In Italy he encountered the Italian overture and opera buffa, both of which deeply affected the evolution of his own practice. In London and Italy, the galant style was in the ascendent: simple, light music with a mania for cadencing; an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other harmonies; symmetrical phrases; and clearly articulated partitions in the overall form of movements. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are homotonal (all three movements having the same key signature, with the slow middle movement being in the relative minor). Others mimic the works of J.C. Bach, and others show the simple rounded binary forms turned out by Viennese composers.

As Mozart matured, he progressively incorporated more features adapted from the Baroque. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major K. 201 has a contrapuntal main theme in its first movement, and experimentation with irregular phrase lengths. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had included three such finales in his recently published Opus 20 set. The influence of the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") period in music, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era, is evident in the music of both composers at that time. Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor K. 183 is another excellent example.

Mozart would sometimes switch his focus between operas and instrumental music. He produced operas in each of the prevailing styles: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo; and Singspiel, of which Die Zauberflöte is the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas he employed subtle changes in instrumentation, orchestral texture, and tone color, for emotional depth and to mark dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted: his increasingly sophisticated use of the orchestra in the symphonies and concertos influenced his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas was in turn reflected in his later non-operatic compositions.

Influence

Mozart's most famous pupil, whom the Mozarts took into their Vienna home for two years as a child, was probably Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a transitional figure between Classical and Romantic eras. More important is the influence Mozart had on composers of later generations. Ever since the surge in his reputation after his death, studying his scores has been a standard part of the training of classical musicians.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Mozart's junior by fifteen years, was deeply influenced by his work, with which he was acquainted as a teenager. He is thought to have performed Mozart's operas while playing in the court orchestra at Bonn, and he traveled to Vienna in 1787 hoping to study the older composer. Some of Beethoven's works have direct models in comparable works by Mozart, and he wrote (WoO 58) to Mozart's D minor piano concerto K. 466.

A number of composers have paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on his themes. Beethoven wrote four such sets (Op. 66, WoO 28, WoO 40, WoO 46). Others include Frédéric Chopin's Variations on "Là ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni (1827) and Max Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart (1914), based on the variation theme in the piano sonata K. 331. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote his Orchestral Suite No. 4 in G, "Mozartiana" (1887), as a tribute to Mozart.

Köchel catalogue

For unambiguous identification of works by Mozart, a Köchel catalogue number is used. This is a unique number assigned, in regular chronological order, to every one of his known works. A work is referenced by the abbreviation "K." followed by this number. The first edition of the catalogue was completed in 1862 by Ludwig von Köchel. It has since been repeatedly updated, as scholarly research improves our knowledge of the dates and authenticity of individual works.

See also

The Complete Mozart Edition, 180 compact discs arranged into 45 themed volumes released by Philips Classics Records in 2000.

Mozart effect

Mozart family

Mozart in fiction

Mozartkugel

Mozarteum

Mozarthaus Vienna

Notes

References

Fradkin, Robert A. (1996) The well-tempered announcer: a pronunciation guide to classical music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 025321064X.

Further reading

External links

Mozarthaus Salzburg

Salzburg Tourist Office – Salzburg City Tourist Board website.

Digitized, scanned Material (Books, Sheet music)

"Mozart" Titles; Mozart as author from archive.org

"Mozart" Titles; Mozart as author from books.google.com

Digital Mozart Edition (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum)

"Mozart" titles from Gallica

From the British Library

*Mozart's Thematic Catalogue (view with "Turning the Pages")

*Mozart's Musical Diary

*Background information on Mozart and the Thematic Catalogue

Letters of Leopold Mozart und Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Badische Landesbibliothek)

Sheet music (Scores)

Complete sheetmusic (scores) from the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum)

"Mozart" Titles from the Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ)

"Mozart" Titles from the University of Rochester

Free typeset sheet music of Mozart's works from Cantorion.org

Mozart as author from archive.org

Mozart as author from books.google.com

* Category:Classical era composers Category:German composers Category:Opera composers Category:Organ improvisers Category:Viennese composers Category:Austrian classical pianists Category:Child classical musicians Category:People from Salzburg Category:Austrian Roman Catholics Category:Knights of the Golden Spur Category:1756 births Category:1791 deaths